Oklahoma City seeks a Sonic boom

OKLAHOMA CITY — When Mayor Mick Cornett surveys downtown, he sees a place that has come a long way since the crippling oil bust of the 1980s. The trouble is, few outside the city realize it.

If outsiders think about this sprawling prairie city — and they rarely do — they likely flash back to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which killed 168 people in the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"That bombing took our name," Cornett said between bites of prime rib at a posh restaurant in the city's growing Bricktown entertainment district. "We have a horrible branding problem in this city that I've been trying to address."

The answer civic leaders have come up with is to make a grab for a piece of Seattle's image.

On March 4, voters will decide whether to raise $120 million in taxes to lure the Seattle SuperSonics as Oklahoma's first major professional sports team.

The money from extending an existing 1 cent sales tax would pay to renovate the 6-year-old Ford Center arena and build a separate NBA practice facility and team offices. "Citizens for a Big League City" says the campaign represents the logical next step in a series of popular local tax measures that have revitalized downtown.

The timing of the vote is aimed directly at an NBA meeting in April, when league owners are expected to consider a request by the Sonics' Oklahoma City-based ownership group to move Seattle's 41-year basketball franchise. Backers of the move say it's nothing personal, but if Seattle politicians can't put together the money for an NBA arena, Oklahoma City may be happy to oblige.

In one sense, the looming arena-tax vote has already pushed the city into big-league territory. Oklahomans have joined the debate — all too familiar to Seattle and other large cities — over the morality of subsidizing professional sports teams owned by millionaires and billionaires.

Although most of Oklahoma City's business and civic leaders publicly support the tax, a poll conducted for a local television station last month found 434 likely voters evenly divided on the measure.

Meanwhile, a scrappy group of opponents has emerged. They're loosely organized but determined to defeat what they view as a giveaway to some of the richest men in Oklahoma. They hope that if voters in Seattle and Oklahoma City join together and say no to the demands of pro-sports owners, they'll start a national trend.

"Gall and greed"

Wanda Jo Stapleton, a 74-year-old retired state legislator, is so incensed she's waging a one-woman crusade from her modest brick house in south Oklahoma City. For the last two weeks she's spent six hours a day calling potential voters, and she recently printed up hundreds of yard signs.

"Their gall and greed is phenomenal," Stapleton said of the Sonics' owners. "They want to pilfer the pockets of grannies existing on Social Security."

The eight business executives who paid $350 million to buy the Sonics in 2006 from the Seattle-based group led by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz are some of the most influential people in Oklahoma. They include Aubrey McClendon, the billionaire owner of Chesapeake Energy, and Clay Bennett, who runs the investment firm Dorchester Capital and whose wife's family owns The Oklahoman newspaper.

Although the 1 cent sales tax is relatively small and would expire after 15 months, critics point out it would be levied even on essentials such as groceries. (Washington and many other states exempt groceries from the sales taxes.)

Marcus Evans, a city firefighter who also runs the Dorothy Day Center, a Catholic food pantry that delivers cans of green beans, bags of rice and other staples to 350 families a month, said it's "unconscionable" for city leaders to be propping up a sports franchise while there are so many other needs.

"They don't have any perspective," said Evans, who wrote a recent op-ed piece in The Oklahoman opposing the arena tax.

Oklahoma has a serious poverty problem, consistently ranking as one of the five worst states in the country for hunger, according to a state task-force report released in December. Over the past decade, the percentage of Oklahoma residents classified as "food insecure" rose from 13.1 percent to 14.6 percent, the report said.

The arena tax is also leapfrogging other potential civic improvements. The city had planned to include Ford Center upgrades in a larger package of downtown improvements, such as parks or mass transit. But with NBA owners planning an April vote on the Sonics' relocation request, the city decided to delay those other improvements and focus instead on securing the team.

Those who fret about "giveaways" to professional sports teams miss the point, say supporters of the arena tax. The NBA, with games televised around the world, would bring Oklahoma City the kind of attention it craves.

"There are always a third of the people out there, I don't care what you put in front of them, they're against it," said Roy Williams, president of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce.

Mayor Cornett said getting an NBA team is part of his strategy to create "a city where people want to live." Having an NBA team isn't the sole factor, he said, but it helps when companies are considering where to locate.

Previous projects

The tax being sought for the Ford Center upgrades has funded many public improvements. Since the 1990s, the Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS) program has renovated the downtown convention center, built the Ford Center and a minor-league baseball park, arts facilities and a mile-long canal downtown. A second round of MAPS taxes paid for improvements to school buildings.

After the oil bust and years of suburban sprawl left the city core lifeless, MAPS projects have helped create the Bricktown district on the eastern edge of downtown, drawing visitors to the new canal, baseball park, shopping and restaurants. The city's premiere 1910 luxury hotel, the gothic-inspired Skirvin, shuttered for decades, was refurbished and reopened last year.

"The projects have been very popular, and the people have seen real tangible benefits to them," said Keith Gaddie, a political-science professor at the University of Oklahoma.

Critics of the arena tax say they supported those earlier projects but have dubbed the latest proposal "MAPS for Millionaires."

Despite the critics, the appeal of landing an NBA franchise may be too much for the city to resist. Backers of the tax, funded by business groups, had raised $113,000 for the "yes" campaign as of Friday — and Williams said they're willing to spend "several hundred thousand." Opponents have raised no money.

The city's appetite was whetted when the Ford Center hosted the New Orleans Hornets for two seasons following Hurricane Katrina. Enthusiastic crowds packed the games, and fans suffered a letdown when the team returned to New Orleans. Some continue to hope the Hornets, the team they came to root for, will wind up in Oklahoma City instead of the Sonics.

Patrick Nelson, 29, describes himself as a casual NBA fan. Once in a while, he'd drive to Dallas to see the Mavericks play.

But when the Hornets arrived in Oklahoma City, he and a friend "became superfans overnight," snapped up season tickets and started a popular Web site and fan forum devoted to the team, HornetsCentral.com. When news came that Bennett and others might bring the Sonics to town, he added a Sonics section to the Web site.

Nelson and other arena-tax backers said Oklahomans don't have anything against Seattle. If anything, he said, there is a bit of envy about Seattle's big, publicly funded sports stadiums.

"That's Seattle — one of the top 10 cities in the U.S," he said. "People don't know who Oklahoma City is. This kind of puts us on the map."

The Ford Center, built for $89 million in cash in 2002, doesn't look much nicer than Seattle's KeyArena right now. When the Hornets played here, the arena staff had to improvise, using curtains to provide lounge areas for high-end ticket buyers.

If voters approve the tax March 4, the arena will get a serious makeover that would put it on par with new NBA arenas, said Ford Center General Manager Gary Desjardins.

Decorative tiling would replace plain concrete floors. A 12,000-square-foot "family fun" zone would offer amusements for children. Most important, new exclusive lounges, skyboxes, and other luxury amenities such as flat-screen TVs for suites would be added to appeal to the richest ticket holders.

The city's lease with the Sonics would have to be worked out later but likely would grant the team most of the revenue from the renovated building.

Williams, the chamber president, said the choice facing Oklahoma City voters is fairly straightforward.

"Cities don't do this for the sake of it being a great business model. They do it for community pride. They do it for community image," he said. "We have to decide whether this is infrastructure which helps elevate this community, as opposed to being a toy for rich people."

News researchers Miyoko Wolf and Gene Balk contributed to this report.

Jim Brunner: 206-515-5628 or jbrunner@seattletimes.com